We live in an age in which deceit is more pervasive than anything Jonathan Swift ever experienced. Today, many truths are totally ignored, lies and myths are generated by media, and our politicians are the main purveyors of the propaganda and the pretension that poisons our national debate. We live in an age of unprecedented myths, hypocrisies, evasions, and lies, and that duplicity is seldom challenged. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, consider the following specifics.
GWB sat through the attacks on 9/11, an act of treason, precisely because his Administration wanted the attacks to occur, giving him what turned out to be unprecedented Presidential power. Proof can be found on the DVD, The Demolitions, which is available at 911Mysteries.com. Furthermore, everyone inside the Beltway knows the truth. The important people in politics, including our current President, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the VIPs of media, such as network anchors, know all of this and much more. If they haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, their staffs have, and almost all would claim to have read The 9/11 Commission Report even if they haven't. The new Administration may go after the previous Administration with charges of torture, but they will totally ignore Bush treason on 9/11. Why have all Republicans, all Democrats, including Obama, and all members of major media simply ignored what was clearly treason to any honest, informed person? I don't know, but my guess is fear. Everyone inside the beltway fears the Big Boys, the billionaire capitalists and bankers who now control us with the following hypocrisies, evasions, and lies.
Distorted Statistics - Our Presidents and Congresses have been cooking the nation's economic numbers since Kennedy started tweaking the numbers in his Administration. LBJ was worse according to Kevin Phillips in his May '08 article in Harper's Magazine, "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know." Phillips shows how each president since Johnson has made bureaucratic changes beneficial to that administration at that time, so that now the real unemployment rate and real inflation rate are both about double today's reported figures.
Today's consumer price index, the CPI, would be 3.5-4% higher without all the changes made since Carter, and that means Social Security checks would be 70 percent higher than they are currently. Phillips goes into much greater detail in his book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. The net result is that the economic numbers reporting the health of the American economy are as fraudulent as those of the banking and finance industries. Those rosier numbers, also known as lies, help keep the Establishment in power.
Class Warfare - Fraudulent government statistics also contribute to the class warfare that has been waged mainly by Republicans against the middle class and the poor since 1981, the start of the age of Reagan, and that philosophy and series of policies might best be described as the Republican low-wage-crime-drug cycle. Low wages, stagnant salaries and lost benefits lead to-what else but--crime and drugs, which often as not leads to jail. It becomes a vicious cycle that destroys mainly people of color. California has more black men in jail than in college to this day, but you will never hear Representative Maxine Waters or Senators Boxer and Feinstein speaking of the Republican low-wage-crime-drug-cycle!
Politicians always rebel against exposing the hypocrisy, for to expose it is to have a lot of explaining to do. Taking on myths, lies, hypocrisy, and evasions takes real leadership, so it seldom happens. However, we can begin to change all that by challenging the GOP to name all of the Republican bills, programs, laws, and actions that have benefited poor and middle-class Americans that they have initiated or introduced in Congress and passed since Ronald Reagan came to power twenty-eight years ago. What have they done for the average American? We know what they have done for the top ten percent, but what have they done for us, the working people of America?
Jesus was a Reactionary! Sounds crazy doesn't it? Yet that is the way it must be--based on the politics of so-called "conservative Christians" or "Christian conservatives." Such self-deceivers love the rich, despise the poor, throw bromides to the middle class, practice war, preach love, yet are obsessed with making money and succeeding. Jesus, on the other hand, was a bleeding-heart liberal who lived a life of loving, sharing, and caring.
We begin to destroy the hypocrisy and reveal the reality with the following question for the Reverend Billy Graham and Ex-President Bush: "Was Jesus Christ a conservative or a liberal?" I ask Reverend Graham because he is Bush's mentor, and he'll probably try to come to Bush's rescue with something like, "Jesus Christ was not political!" To which I would immediately respond, "Are you kidding Reverend Graham? The greatest political act in history, sir, was when that semi-literate carpenter from Nazareth stood before the greatest empire the world has ever seen and said, 'Hey fellas, you've got it all wrong. It's not, "Might make right!" It's not, "The spot with the dollar sign beside your name; always, always maximize your gain." That's not it. It's really about loving, sharing, and caring.' I hope you, Reverend Graham and Ex-President Bush, will join me in building a world of loving, sharing, and caring."
Our Wide-open Border - 'Loving, sharing, and caring,' doesn't mean that we should just ignore American laws, look the other way, and ignore millions of desperate aliens who have slipped into the U.S. and taken American jobs. That is exactly what has been happening since Ronald Reagan became president, yet Congresses and all presidents since Reagan have simply refused to recognize the problem. Why? There is one major reason that illegal immigration is ignored by everyone. Foreigners are still streaming across our borders because the billionaires want it that way! That's how they got to be billionaires: paying very low taxes and paying very low wages. Endless inflowing labor keeps American wages flat in all but the most skilled professions, and it helped destroy unions, one of the objectives of corporations. That, along with Reagan's very low taxes, enabled multi-millionaires to turn into billionaires in the 1980s.
We must recognize that our lax law enforcement sucked in immigrants; now, we must pay them to leave. We must seal our borders, halt all immigration, demand that all aliens register with the INS, and pay them to leave on schedule over the next five years. Those who had been here two years or less would get travel expenses and maybe $500. Married couples with four or more kids and 15 years in the U.S. would receive as much as $40,000 and travel expenses. All will leave within five years. That's what needs to happen--negative population growth--if we are to stabilize our population, stabilize our work force, and again begin to raise wages.
The Federal Reserve is our Friend - The Fed is the enemy of all of us because it is an imposter, not part of our government at all. It is a cabal of the nation's biggest bankers, and the Federal Reserve's control of money creation, a right granted only to Congress by the Constitution, is the device that allows them to make enormous profits off the creation of our American money, violating the Constitution in the process. How much are the bankers making? Consider this quote from Ellen Brown's excellent book, Web of Debt, "Somebody is paying interest on most of the money in the world all of the time. A dollar accruing interest at 5 percent, compounded annually, becomes two dollars in about 14 years. At that rate, banks siphon off as much money in interest every 14 years as there was in the entire world 14 years earlier."
Show you the money? You'll probably have to visit some Swiss banks to see it, but it is somewhere. Are there ways to change all of this? Yes, but it will be hard to pull off. Most members of Congress are ignorant of what is going on, and the bankers are powerful and have a history of winning a vast majority of the time. The last time the bankers lost was when a guy named Honest Abe ran the show. Let's consider what worked for him and check out how it might work for us in the 21st century.
In her latest blog in Yes Magazine, Ms. Brown, revisits Abe Lincoln's successes in the 1860s by having the U.S. Treasury, not the bankers, issue Greenbacks by which Lincoln paid for all his projects. In that article Brown reminds us that in addition to fighting and winning a civil war with the South, Lincoln also accomplished, in fifty months at the White House, the following:
"The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. In short, Lincoln's government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen." Not too bad for one term, right? Brown's open letter to President Obama lays the groundwork for a quick, but real, revival economically.
Factory Farming is Good Farming! - This one is becoming increasingly a no-brainer. With factory farms, the food travels further, the animals are badly mistreated and given antibiotics and other drugs, and the soil that grows the plants is dead soil, full of pesticides and herbicides along with enough synthetic fertilizer to grow a plant. There are no earthworms or grubs that are a necessary part of living soil. By returning to family-owned farms and even subsidizing organic farming initially, we will generate more jobs than factory farming, providing a good income for more families.
Hemp and Marijuana, the Greatest Plants on Earth - Hemp and marijuana have been used by humans for millennia. You can make almost anything out of hemp: paper, cars, clothes, houses, and even nutritious granola from its seeds. It can also be grown in multiple climates, in a variety of soil conditions and rainfall levels, and it has drought-resistant qualities. The Right hates marijuana because it is a mind-opener for some people and the Republicans would much prefer complacent slaves instead of questioning citizens. There is also the medicinal effect. In California it is legally used, and taxed, as a medicine. More to the point, however, is this basic fact that is ignored: what goes into an adult's body in a free society is the business of that adult and not that of any form of government.
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